45% Increase in Earned Value Creation
Lowered Costs by Tens of Millions
Strategic Intent
To effectively deliver customer contract requirements on time, and develop operating cost efficiencies to improve customer satisfaction and the resultant “award fee” revenue
Situation
- $30 billion aerospace and defense company
- Leader in design and deployment of space systems
- Excels at engineering knowledge and application
- Newly acquired business unit wins large, long-term, high-visibility U.S. government contract
- After one year, work is grossly overdue and over-budget and is further complicated by functionality issues
Issues and Barriers
- Engineering-centric culture lacks focus on productivity and resource utilization
- Only 48% of all project milestones completed on time
- Weak alignment between project team’s work assignments and contract requirements
- Unclear project priorities hindered the resolution of critical path barriers
- Poor functionality decisions resulted in “over-engineering”
- Team leaders lacked sufficient management skills, tools and training to lead effectively
Key Implementations
- Established and translated clear performance goals and expectations to all levels
- Installed comprehensive team-level management processes that focus on task definition and linkage to contract deliverables
- Developed expert models for team leaders that clarified their roles and responsibilities, while balancing technical and managerial attributes
- Designed and implemented new organizational structures to handle issue resolution faster
Results
Increased earned value creation by 45%, which greatly improved schedule attainment as well as award fee revenues- Stabilized contract functionality, resulting in routine passing of milestone tests and reviews, and improved customer satisfaction
- Lowered costs to a level that saved the client tens of millions over the remaining years of this contract
The client’s sense of urgency about quickly achieving these results led to a comparatively short and very accelerated Stage II implementation period of only 20 calendar weeks. However, the client’s satisfaction with this work was further expressed when Brooks International was engaged for a Stage III internalization effort of monthly three-day visits for six months to ensure sustainability.
Client Perspective
Our employees have grasped and internalized the concepts, processes and methods implemented with Brooks’ assistance. We could not have achieved these needed and fundamental changes, nor realized these results in such a compressed time frame, without the assistance of Brooks.
— Division President
It is good that this is so hard for my engineers. We have all been too technically focused at the expense of business thinking. We have a long way to go, but it’s clear to me that we’ve taken the first step with Brooks, one that we have never been able to take on our own.
— Program Manager
